The rain pattered on the wharfside streets, cooling everything a little. In the distance the bells of the fire trucks never stopped. It smelled like Warsaw; charred plaster, burning oil, and cordite. Bernette wrinkled her nose and splashed herself with White Ginger perfume, so that the room smelled like bombs and gardenias. Would the gentleman, she wanted to know, care for a half-and-half when he’d finished his lentils? The money he’d given her entitled him to at least that. No, de Milja said. Somehow the events of the day had left him not much in the mood for such things. Strange, he thought, how much I like you. Like me a wanderer, somehow never home.
That was, it happened, true. She’d had a home, a child, a family, but, well, what did it all matter? God meant her not to have them and now she didn’t. It wasn’t much of a story anyhow.
Well the hell with everybody, he said. And he was getting tired of the four walls—could they go out for a walk? She agreed to go. Scared as she was, she agreed. Strange, he thought, how you stumble on the world’s secret nobility when you’re not even looking for them.
When she went down the hall to the toilet de Milja poured half a bottle of beer down his shirt. She made a sour face about that when she returned—she could wash it out in the sink. No, he said, turned away from her so she wouldn’t smell that he’d washed his mouth with the rest of the beer and splashed some on his hair.
Outside it was quiet at first, the rain hissing on a few small fires here and there. Some of the townspeople were poking through the burnt-out café, lifting a blackened timber then dropping it quickly when they saw what was under it. The patron, the toughest man in Nieuwpoort, was sitting on the curb and weeping into a dirty handkerchief, his shoulders shaking. “Ach,” Bernette said, fought back the tears, then steadied. Soot drifted down on them as they walked, walked carefully because the sea fog hung over the town. Quiet water that night, just lapping at the foot of the quai as the tide went out. Walking away from the center of Nieuwpoort they were stopped by a pair of Wehrmacht sentries. Nervy and angry now that they’d been on the wrong end of the war for a moment—they hadn’t liked that at all.
But what could they do with a beer-smelling slob and a whore headed down the beach for a blow job? He was now Rosny, Belgian of Czech descent, a long story. In the end the Germans waved them along, but for half a pfennig they would have run a rifle butt under his chin just to see his heels fly up in the air. Because they had dead friends and half-dead friends and would-have-been-better-off-dead friends— de Milja knew what bombing did to people—and they were full of rage, and quite dangerous. Bernette, good Bernette, looked at them a certain way, and maybe that bled out the fury just enough to keep de Milja’s jaw from getting broken, but it was a close thing.
The sirens went off about an hour past midnight, and de Milja and Bernette moved off the beach and back into the dunes. They were in the town’s shame pit—broken glass, old rags, a dead shoe—a hidden place for those Nieuwpoort citizens who had to do something private and couldn’t afford to do it indoors. De Milja moved into the lee of a dune, they sat down on the damp sand, he put an arm around her shoulders and she clung to him, her protector.
Not much more than a gesture, with what came down on Nieuwpoort that night.
The Blenheim, it turned out, was merely an opening act, a juggler on roller skates. Now the full troupe of comedians came running out of the wings. Lancaster bombers, de Milja guessed. The beach shuddered as the bombs hit, to long rolls of thunder and flashes of orange fire in the darkness. Once or twice it was close, sand showered down on them and Bernette whimpered like a poodle and burrowed into him. The antiaircraft people up at the mayor’s office got on the scoreboard just as the raid began, hit a Lancaster with a full bomb load a little way out to sea from the harbor and de Milja swore he could see the night cloud for twenty miles around by the light of the explosion. But most of the rest got through, hitting the town and the sea and the villages nearby and God only knew what else. Pretty soon Nieuwpoort was truly on fire, the Hotel Vlaanderen no more than a pile of smoking brick.
The second British attack came at 3:30 in the morning. It seemed very quiet when they left. De Milja and Bernette dozed, then woke up at dawn, stiff and chilled and miserable. The sea had come alive in first light; white combers rolling in a long way, crying gulls hanging in the air above the breaking surf. De Milja walked down to the tideline to splash his face and there, riding to and fro in a foot of water, a thin trail of yellow foam traced up the back of his uniform, was the first German. Facedown, arms above his head. As de Milja watched, a wave a little more powerful than the ones before picked him up, rushed him in a few extra feet, and dumped him on the wet sand.
It wasn’t clear how he had died—he hadn’t burned, hadn’t been hit by shellfire. Probably he had drowned. He wore a field-gray combat uniform, waist encircled by a belt with ammunition pouches and a commando knife, prepared to fight. One of mine, de Milja thought. But it wasn’t one, it was three, no, a dozen. Hundreds. At first the gray of their uniforms blended with the color of the sea, but as the light changed he could see more and more of them. Most wearing heavy packs, bobbing silently in the surf. Now and then the sea would leave another one on the beach, then, so it seemed to de Milja, go back out in order to bring in a few more.
Dependable port official reports security staff alerting coastal defense units to a landing exercise, to be carried out at division strength, using barges and seagoing tugs, at Westende on the Belgian coast on the night of 12 September.
So this was his kill. It would have been suicide to try for Westende, so he’d settled for
Nieuwpoort, to see what he could see. And here it was. Some of the dead were burned—perhaps a ship had been hit. Perhaps several ships. Invasion troops, from the packs and all the other equipment—the Germans had put on a dress rehearsal for a landing on the beaches of Britain.
And the British had put on a dress rehearsal of their own.
It was much too dangerous to stay where he was, there would be hell to pay on this beach once the Germans discovered what the tide was bringing in. But when he turned to look for Bernette he discovered she’d been standing by his side, bare feet splayed in the sand, arms crossed beneath her breasts.
He put a hand on her shoulder, but she did not respond so he let it drop. Then he knelt down, took a little slip of paper and a stub of pencil from his pocket and sketched the shoulder-patch insignia of one of the dead soldiers: a knight raised a sword above his head, his shield a crusader’s cross. The legend above the knight: Grenadierregiment 46. Legend below: 21 Infanteriedivision Dresden.
He tucked the slip of paper into his pants cuff, then stood up. “I know you are a patriot,” he said.
She had seen, and certainly understood, what he had just done. It was an act of war to learn who the dead were. “Yes,” she said. “I am.” Just one more secret, she thought. She kept them all.
15 September.
Martagne had stolen three carbons from the Port of Calais office; the German landing exercise was one of them.
De Milja made his way south to the village of Sangatte, on the road that ran by the sea from Boulogne to Calais. Fedin was waiting for him in a closed-up villa owned by a Russian baron—lately a toy manufacturer, formerly one of the czar’s riding masters—in Paris. De Milja arrived a little after one in the afternoon, Genya Beilis came by taxi from the resort town of Le Touquet an hour later. All trains from Paris to Boulogne and Calais had been suspended, she said. Military traffic only. Railroad guns. Field hospitals.